PROJECT

Penguins

Albert Quesada: “For this new research called Penguins, not knowing how this endeavour will end up, I want to team up with Katie Vickers and two other dancers. I will propose a subject and basic context, and with the other artists we will dialogue, discuss and discover together. Departing from a simple interest in the endless and rich relationship between movement and music, between dancers and musicians, we will investigate the specific music from the Penguin Cafe and play with ideas between concert and dance performance.”

“Musically, I know what it is to perform Bach, Beethoven, Bizet, Wagner and Ligeti amongst others, and am currently getting used to working with live contemporary musicians and electronics in a small quartet. Researching and dancing with the music of Penguin Cafe will be another step into working with live musicians. However, I have never worked with such a cinematic and popular music as the one from Penguin Cafe. It is a challenge and a privilege to confront my dance practices with their way of playing music, a quest to share a particular listening experience with an audience, and explore the two spaces of theatre and concert hall. In order to continue my performance work, I feel the need to research the role of dance in live music concerts. I’m interested on how orchestras and dance can merge, where dance and the visual display play a major role in concerts.”

Albert Quesada

SP, BE

http://acmearts.xyz

Albert Quesada is a Spanish dancer and choreographer based between Brussels and Barcelona. He trained at MDT (Amsterdam) and P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels) after his studies of philosophy and multimedia engineering in Barcelona. The exploration and translation of musical structures and compositions into choreography and the invitation of an audience to perceive and to listen to the proposed works, stands at the heart of Quesada’s choreographic work. Next to that, Albert is intrigued by group movement and dynamics, sparkled by his collaboration with ZOO/Thomas Hauert. Under the company ACME, he holds many artistic projects, both educational and for the stage. This is together with his long term collaborators Marcus Baldemar, Federica Porello, Mireia de Querol, and Zoltán Vakulya.

  Together with Katie Vickers he co-directs two educational programs in the USA: the theatre and dance summer program at Mercersburg Academy, and the Practicing Performance / International Dance Festival at the Ohio State University. In 2005 Albert created Solo on Bach & Glenn which has been touring since, and which gave birth to the duet Solos Bach & Gould (2010). This was followed by Trilogy (2011), created with Vera Tussing, an evening of three short pieces exploring musical structures. Albert then expanded into larger, group choreographies with the pieces Ensemble (2012), Slow Sports (2012) and Wagner & Ligeti (2014), an examination of our understanding of orchestral music, Slow Sports Outdoors (2014), Slow Sports Kids (2015), OneTwoThreeOneTwo (2015), a duet inspired by the world of flamenco, and VIVA (2016), where the amateur group De Genoten dances to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

His latest work is a collaboration with Octavi Rumbau, Federica Porello and Zoltán Vakulya: It's time (2017). Since June 2009 Albert has been dancing with the company ZOO – Thomas Hauert (Accords, You’ve Changed, In Vivo Danse, Mono, Inaudible). He has also performed for Benjamin Vandewalle.

Credits

Research: Flamingos◊By: ACME / Albert Quesada & Katie Vickers◊Together with: 2 other dancers◊Music by: the Penguin Cafe (http://penguincafe.com)